Web pages get cutoff when printing!

How is it when I print certain web pages the right side of the page is cut off? This gets real irritating and I lose a lot of information.

- David

This question was answered on April 6, 2006. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

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Few things are more aggravating than waiting for a bunch of pages to print out just to find out that you just wasted paper and ink because the formatting did not match your printer’s settings

For all the advances in computing, this issue still takes a little work to avoid.

WYSIWYG (pronounced wiz-ee-wig), which stands for ‘What You See Is What You Get’ is an application standard that was developed to help improve the relationship between your screen and your printer.

With a word processor, it is much easier to maintain a WYSIWYG relationship, because the page size is always the same (8.5” x 11”).

When it comes to the Internet, there is no single standard for page size and to complicate things, layouts are designed in pixels not inches You may also notice that if you change the size of your web browser window, the pictures and text will shuffle around to reorient themselves for the new window size.

This ability to change formatting on-the-fly is accomplished with tables and special language used to create web pages, but it also makes it harder to have everything print exactly the same as you see it on the screen.

Some sites now have a ‘Print’ button on certain pages that will regenerate the information in a printer friendly format (often removing graphics and auto resizing tables), so looking for one on the page is your first option.

If you don’t see a “Print” button, the next option is to change the orientation of your printer Your printer’s default setting is to print to an 8.5” x 11” page in the Portrait mode (8.5” wide) which does not match the width for many web pages

You can widen the print area to 11” by changing the page orientation to Landscape.

Click on the File menu in your browser, then on the Page Setup option Look for the “Orientation” section and choose Landscape.

This will likely result in more printed pages because there is less length per page, but will often times solve your problem.

Here’s a tip for avoiding the wasted ink problem: use the Print Preview option before printing (click on File, Print Preview) which will allow you to see what will print on the screen first

If that doesn’t work or if you want to save more ink when printing web pages, you can use the Cut and Paste feature.

By copying all of the elements from the web page to a Word document, you can reformat the information before you print it, which includes deleting unneeded ink stealing advertising graphics, logos and other elements that you don’t want.

Press CTRL-A while viewing the web page, which will select everything (or if you are good at clicking and dragging, you can select just the text or graphics that want).

Next, press CTRL-C which will appear to do nothing, but will copy all the selected items into your computers temporary memory (known as the Clipboard)

Now open your word processor and press CTRL-V which will paste the contents of the Clipboard into the new document Remove the items that you don’t want, make any formatting changes (size of the text, font style, etc.) and then print!

About the author

Posted by Ken Colburn of Data Doctors on April 6, 2006

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